Should Prostitution Be Legalized?

﻿Lindsay Fisher
JoAnna St Germain
ENG 102-013
October 25th, 2013
Should Prostitution Be Legalized?When people hear the word prostitution, they automatically think of it as just women selling their bodies for sex. There is far more reasoning behind prostitution and why it still remains so popular everywhere today. Some may believe prostitution should be legalized, while others find it absurd to legalize. Prostitution can be viewed as one’s occupation, how one makes a living, or their profession. It can also be viewed as women and their bodies being taken advantage of and that no human’s body should be bought and sold. Being a sophomore in college, I understand that it is extremely hard to make a living on your own. Not saying that I stand on the street to make my money, but I understand where the women are coming from that partake in prostitution. Most of the women involved in prostitution entered at an early age to make money and couldn’t afford to go to college so they settled for prostitution. Prostitution has been around for many years and there are a lot of different forms for example, street, domestic, brothels, etc. The Prostitution Act of 1996 was an act to decriminalize and regulate prostitution. In the Prostitution Act of 1996, a ton of valid points were made for legalizing prostitution. There are six parts to the act, preliminary, prostitution consultation board, regulations, registration, offences, and consequential amendments. I’ve decided to do further research on the legalization of prostitution so that everyone can get an understanding as to why prostitution should be legalized.

In my first source, an article from the New Internationalist, two authors Dianne Post and Bishakha Datta go head to head as to why prostitution should and should not be legalized. Datta, who is a writer and filmmaker based in India, believes that prostitution should in fact be legalized. Datta believes that individuals have sex for all kinds of different reasons. For example, sex for pleasure, for fun, to have children, even to earn a living. Also, rather than thinking it’s just a form of coercion, we should listen to women when they say that prostitution is a form of livelihood or commerce. Prostitutes just want the rights that all other humans have when they have an occupation. Post is a human rights lawyer whom on the other hand, believes that it should remain illegal for many reasons. Post reminds us in the article that women who sell themselves for sex to another man’s sexual access is found to be a form of inequality of gender, sex, and race. “Legalization gives approval to violence, control, and devaluation. When violence is directed at half of the worlds population – women – it undermines the entire structure of human rights,” says Post. Dianne suggests that we too also listen to the voices of women. She states that in a five-country survey, over ninety percent wanted out of prostitution immediately.

After reading the argument about prostitution and whether it should be legalized, I realized that when two people are trying to get their point across as to why it should or should not be legalized, they each use different subjects of the matter. For example, Datta seemed to focus mainly on the women that enjoy prostitution as their occupation, and that we should be aware that they deserve all of the same rights that other human beings receive. She also looks at the financial aspect of prostitution and draws in the fact that in India 68.7% of people live off of less than two dollars a day, and that’s why some people turn to sex work as their way of living. She makes a good point that we legally accept the other badly paid forms of informal labor such as construction, farm labor, etc. where they use their hands and such to earn a living and sex is no different. Post then focuses more on the human rights and equality of men and women. Dianne makes valid points that we as a whole need to do better for women and get rid of...

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Besson/ Outline
Topic: Prostitution
General Purpose: To Persuade
Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience that prostitutionshould be legalized.
Thesis Statement: Prostitutionshould be legalized in the United States.
Organizational Pattern: Monroe’s Motivated Sequence
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I. Need Step: There are problems associated with not legalizing prostitution.
A. The ability for any human being, whether it be a man or a woman, to have control over their body is critical to Civil Rights
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Currently, prostitution is a dangerous occupation because it’s dangerous in the sense of medical and health issues for both the prostitutes and their customers. Prostitution is a very quick way to spread sexually transmitted diseases (Chittom). Most times a condom is not used in prostitution. Not using protection leads to “quicker ways to get the clap, AIDS, and H.I.V” (Hart). Sex workers sometimes end up pregnant and they have a hard time finding out the father of their children truly is. It is very important to wear a condom during sexual activities. The sexual contact between prostitutes and married men is one of the leading causes of the spread of AIDS into the general population.
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